"Azeroth" isn't the typical site for an academic conference, but that is just where communication professor Dmitri Williams (pictured) held a recent discussion about the relationships between the World of Warcraft and the real world. If you are wondering where Azeroth is located, you won't find it on a world atlas (but you can find a map here). It's a virtual world inhabited by about 10 million people who play World of Warcraft, one of the most popular Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games in the (real) world.
Williams said one of the best parts of his session — titled "Relationships Between WoW and the Real World" and attended by about 120 people in the form of avatars — was the diverse and interdisciplinary group of people who attended and shared their ideas about research.
"You don't normally get librarians, economists and psychologists together, let alone in a cavern filled with bubbling oil," he said. "It was the first conference-level event in a virtual world rather than just a virtual equivalent of a board meeting or a conference call, which is pretty common now in places like Second Life."
According to John Bohannon, who wrote a June 20 Science Magazine article about the conference: "Virtual worlds such as Azeroth are a treasure trove for psychological, social, and economic research. The atmosphere was casual and animated, like the conversations that happen between lectures at a good scientific meeting. But at this conference, the chat was happening on the computer monitors of 200 to 300 people scattered around the globe. The participants were embodied as virtual characters standing in the cavernous chamber, many of them at that moment knee-deep in a green, bubbling pool."
Said Williams: "90% of the people wouldn't be at an International Communication Association conference or American Sociological Association meeting. They’re all from different backgrounds. It's nice to get people from different fields together — that's how you really build knowledge."
But why research what is happening in virtual worlds?
"First, because there are a lot of people in the real world who are in them and it's a phenomenon in its own right," Williams said. "Second, to investigate what we can test about the real world by using virtual worlds."
Virtual worlds use their own currency, and Williams said researchers can study economic systems, for example, by manipulating the amount of money available to then study inflation.
"(Williams' session) focused mostly on social psychology," Bohannon wrote. "It had a reading list as well as working papers put online by the panelists during the meeting. Then participants were introduced to Azeroth's sophisticated gold-based economy, which has a real-world analog fueled by 'gold-farmers' who sell their virtual wares for real money."
Said Williams: "We talked about whether virtual worlds were viable spaces for research. We talked about whether people could build real communities within them, and whether there was transfer or effects from events within the virtual world to the real world. Does what happens there affect us here?"
See what the conference looked like
Conference screenshots
Science Magazine article
More on Williams
